CLASSICAL VIEW

CLASSICAL VIEW; A Conflict Of Cultures At Steinway

By Edward Rothstein

Published: November 3, 1991

Last month, at the Kawai piano factory in Japan, production began on a new piano. It is being made using Japanese materials and manufacturing techniques, but inside the instrument, on the metal plate, will appear words testifying to its American lineage: "Designed by Steinway & Sons." The piano, to be introduced in January, is dubbed the Boston.

The debut of a new piano is remarkable in itself, but all the more so because of Steinway's involvement. The hybrid Boston instrument, in seven upright and grand styles, to be priced in the $10,000 range, took three engineers at Steinway's Queens factory less than two years to design. It will compete not with the company's premiere instruments -- which range in price from $10,300 to $59,900 -- but with the assembly-line pianos from the Far East that dominate the market: pianos like Kawai, Yamaha and Young Chang.

The Boston would never have been made by the old family firm of Steinway & Sons, which from its founding in 1853 repeatedly rejected proposals for a "cheaper" line. The Steinway was just too important: not only is the piano used by nearly every major concert artist, its design has defined the very character of the modern piano.

But the company was sold in 1972 to CBS and then again in 1985 to Steinway Musical Properties. The introduction of the new instrument is one sign of changes in factory and philosophy under the present ownership. These changes have been either derided as a departure from the tradition of artisanship or praised as a courageous attempt to bring a decaying guild-hall factory into another century.

The changes began just after the new owners had settled in. They fired the head of the factory, a third-generation Steinwegian, and brought in Daniel Koenig, an engineer from General Electric whose experience was with steam turbines and motors. Late last year, a new general manager was hired, Sanford G. Woodard, who had been a quality control engineer in the nuclear industry. Many old-timers, who possessed intimate, detailed knowledge of the instrument, have retired or left the company, some with bitterness.

In 1988, one of Steinway's owners told me of hopes to increase piano production by at least 50 percent -- heresy for Steinway devotees. At that time Mr. Koenig said the mystique of artisanship was irrelevant: "From my point of view, the piano is essentially an engineered and manufactured product" that can be produced "in a textbook manner."

"I get uptight about advertising hand craftsmanship and things like that," he said. "To me it doesn't indicate quality but a stubbornness, holding on to the past."

The attitudes implied in these comments, along with misgivings by some concert artists and reports of cut corners at the factory, worried me in 1988 and 1989, when I first reported on the troubling Steinway transition in Smithsonian and The New Republic. But pianos can take months to build and years to reveal their virtues and failings.

Last spring, both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times raised further concerns. Reports noted that production quotas had been established and internal objections stifled, and standards were slipping. One concert pianist told me that during the last few years the "magic has gone out of the concert grands." Pianos, he said, are more uniform but at the cost of grandeur and beauty.

In Connecticut, a former Steinway dealer, Michael Yeager, has been documenting cracks and ridges in over 100 recently manufactured soundboards, the instrument's heart. In an internal memo from February 1989, a senior management official of the company warned: "We have never had this many cracked-soundboard problems in the past."

But last week, Bruce Stevens, the president of Steinway, claimed that such cracks are neither more frequent nor more debilitating than before. He denied reports of cut corners and increased production. He rejected claims that wood wasn't properly tempered and asserted that, with millions of dollars invested in the factory, the instrument is better now than ever. Finally, and perhaps most important, another distinguished concert pianist told me that today's Steinways seem better than those made a decade ago.

These issues are too important to be decided summarily. But Steinway & Sons is caught between two cultures -- the old culture of the family factory and the modern culture of industrial engineering in a troubled marketplace. The founders were visionaries: they built a school for workers' children and constructed the town of Steinway, which was later incorporated into the borough of Queens. Such care and attention were devoted to the instrument as well. One independent technician, Dennis W. Nicholson, spoke religiously about the instrument that once was and still could be: "You can't teach a person how to love a piece of wood, how to love a piano. You need people obsessed with a dream."

That atmosphere is not likely to be reproduced at the contemporary factory. But the piano may require it. It would be useful, in any case, were Steinway to adopt a motto Theodore Steinway -- the second-generation genius of the family -- kept over his workbench as he was perfecting the piano we now know. It affirms humility before the immense task: "Who knows his trade is a Journeyman;/ A Master is he that invents the plan;/ An Apprentice, each and every man."

The Boston piano is a product of Journeyman marketing strategy. It will involve neither Mastery nor Apprenticeship. The real Steinway must encompass all three.